It was July. School had been out long enough that the empty days stretched out like a hot vision in the desert, just out of reach and we sat around the coolest place we could find--the river, a basement, a park in the shade--waiting for summer jobs to come our way. Mostly, we waited for harvest, the lurid days behind the wheel of the little wheat trucks or the water truck didn't pay particularly high but after all the hours that got put in it paid well. But harvest was a ways away from the last day of school, so we waited, patiently, letting the boredom well up.
I don't remember how, exactly, Zach and I got the connection, but a mutual friend had a girlfriend whose mom's boyfriend had a couple of hay fields and he needed someone to buck bails for a couple of days. Our mutual friend couldn't help, football camp, or injury, or other commitments, I don't remember, but he would have been ankle high in the hay stubble if he could have been, I am sure of that.
Pendleton finds itself in a complicated setting. The Umatilla Indian Reservation stretches away to the east and the town itself is surrounded by wheat fields. Between Pendleton and Mission (the reservation town) is an awkward stretch of small farms and trailer parks littered in a wide, flat valley. It is sort of a purgatory between the Rez and Pendleton with a retirement home, views of the trees that grow thick around the river, a ready mix, train tracks, and acres upon acres of hay fields and pastures. Zach and I where in the middle of this no-man's land working for a guy named Todd with two old timers who were his hired hands: a tall Native American roper who road a tall buckskin horse and a drunk tractor driver who didn't do anything as far as I could tell at the time.
Hay fields in July are hot. From about 9:30 am to dark. There is no shade except the that the tuck and trailer cast stingily about and there is little time for rest. The bales weigh anywhere from 60 to 100lbs. and each one is thrown onto a trailer, by a guy in the field, and stacked by a guy on the trailer. The truck doesn't stop moving but crawls along the rows of bales in a big circle. Zach and I trotting beside pitching bales while the roper and the drunk took shifts stacking on the trailer. Todd didn't help, I don't think. At the very least, I don't remember him working much at all.
I'll be perfectly honest at this point and say I was happy for the distraction and there wasn't really that much hay to take care of. We probably move three or four tons the first day. Enough hard, physical labor to get our backs and arms sore, for sure, and we were tired on the drive home. But each of us, I am positive, counted the wages of the day, assumed it to be eight bucks an hour (the standard high school farm pay) and we were happy in the days work for 80 bucks. Time spent outside, in the company of interesting strangers, makin' a bit of cash. Good times. We arrived the next morning, 7 am, ready for more of the same.
We waited in front of Todd's trailer for a half hour before we knocked. He answered the door in his underwear. Fat beer belly pressed against the screen door, he was putrid with body odor and beer and asked for a few moments to get dressed. The hired help showed up shortly, Todd gave us the day's instructions then disappeared down the road, and the four of us went to work stacking hay. Loading it from one pile, driving down the road, and stacking it in another. Remember the scene in Cool Hand Luke when Luke is forced to dig a whole, then fill it, then dig it, then fill it? That's what moving hay feels like. It's heavy, its hot, we were sore and tired from the day before and the drunk slept behind the wheel between stops and the roper rubbed his sore elbows and Zach and I bucked up and bucked bales and made relatively short work of the hay. Napping on the drive from one stack to another, sweating in the heat of the sun, the heat of the truck, the heat of hay, and looking forward to some hard earned cash.
As we finished moving the hay, Todd appeared with a sack full of cold drinks. Soda's for Zach and I (I learned full refreshing value of Squirt that day) beer for the old men. We sat on piles of hay and let the sun finish its damage on our skin, the heat seeping into us, restful in the knowledge of finality. We drove back to the trailer, the drunk and the roper walked to the horse pen and started getting ready for roping practice.
Todd gave us each a 50 dollar bill before he disappeared into the trailer. We looked at each other and silently left. Zach's bronco kicked up the dust as we drove slowly back to the paved road. We made three dollars thirty-three cents an hour.
We didn't talk about it and I never bucked bales again.
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